Mauricio Galleguillos

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Verified

Mauricio verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD, MS
• Professor (Associate) at Adolfo Ibáñez University

The freshwater availability of Chiloé Island is threatened by a probable decrease in precipitation in the XXI century. Therefore, preserving ecosystem services, particularly those linked to water provision and regulation, is crucial for local human development. This study seeks to gauge the risk of these services by considering the ecosystem struct...

Droughts are often long-lasting phenomena, without a distinct start or end and with impacts cascading across sectors and systems, creating long-term legacies. Nevertheless, our current perceptions and management of droughts and their impacts are often event-based, which can limit the effective assessment of drought risks and reduction of drought im...

Many regions in Chile experienced an unprecedented drought from 2010 to 2022, driven by climate change and natural variability. This so-called megadrought led to severe water scarcity, causing conflicts and exposing issues in Chilean water regulations. Water-intensive agriculture in areas with limited water availability has worsened these problems,...

Land subdivisions, especially in rural areas, pose a significant threat to sustainable development in many regions of the world. This issue is particularly challenging to understand in complex landscapes, where many biophysical and anthropic drivers interact without the necessary land regulatory guidance. We combined kernel density analysis and mac...

The Chilean Coastal Range, located in the Mediterranean segment of Chile, is a soil-mantled landscape with the potential to store valuable freshwater supplies and support a biodiverse native forest. Nevertheless, human intervention has been increasing soil erosion for ∼ 200 years, culminating in the intense management of exotic tree plantations thr...

The CLDynamicLandCover dataset is a dynamic land use dataset for Central Chile, covering latitudes -31.61 to -43.50. It provides land cover maps on a five-year scale from 1990 to 2018, created by a semi-automatic algorithm initially developed for the coastal sector of south-central Chile. This method was later expanded to cover areas from the south...

Protecting natural ecosystems requires monitoring approaches that work as early warning systems to avoid degradation and protect biodiversity. However, separating forest disturbance causes in change-detection pipelines is challenging due to the complex interplay of multiple drivers affecting vegetation. This study aims to detect deforestation in hi...

There is a wide variety of drought indices, yet a consensus on suitable indices and temporal scales for monitoring streamflow drought remains elusive across diverse hydrological settings. Considering the growing interest in spatially distributed indices for ungauged areas, this study addresses the following questions: (i) What temporal scales of pr...

The variability and drivers of carbon and water fluxes and their relationship to ecosystem water use efficiency (WUE) in natural ecosystems of southern South America are still poorly understood. For 8 years (2015–2022), we measured carbon dioxide net ecosystem exchange (NEE) and evapotranspiration (ET) using eddy covariance towers in a temperate ra...

Droughts are often long lasting phenomena, without a distinct start or end, and with impacts cascading across sectors and systems, creating long-term legacies. Nevertheless, our current perception and management of droughts and their impacts is often event-based, which can limit the effective assessment of drought risks and reduction of drought imp...

La seguridad hídrica se define como la posibilidad de acceder al agua en cantidad y calidad adecuadas para el sustento humano, la salud y el desarrollo socioeconómico, considerando las particularidades ecosistémicas de cada cuenca y promoviendo la resiliencia frente a amenazas como la sequía, crecidas y la contaminación. Alcanzar la seguridad hídr...

Determination of soil volumetric water content θ in forest ecosystems is particularly challenging due to deep rooting systems and unknown soil vertical and spatial heterogeneity. This research aims to test two undisturbed methods, electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) and HYDRUS 2D/3D, for 2D θ determination in a thorny forest ecosystem. The expe...

The variability and drivers of carbon and water fluxes and their relationship to ecosystem water use efficiency (WUE) in natural ecosystems of southern South America are still poorly understood. For eight years (2015–2022), we measured water and carbon fluxes using eddy covariance towers in a temperate rainforest and a peatland in southern Chile. D...

Spatially explicit soil information is crucial for comprehending and managing many of Earth´s processes related to carbon, water, and other biogeochemical cycles. We introduced a gridded database of soil physical properties and hydraulic parameters at 100 meters spatial resolution. It covers the continental area of Chile and binational basins share...

A wide variety of drought indices exist today without consensus on suitable indices and temporal scales for monitoring streamflow drought across diverse hydrological settings. Considering the growing interest in spatially-distributed indices for ungauged areas, this study addresses the following questions: i) what temporal scales of precipitation-b...

The Coastal Range in the Mediterranean segment of Chile is a soil mantled landscape with potential to store valuable supplies of fresh water and support a biodiverse native forest. Nevertheless, human intervention has been increasing soil erosion for ~ 200 yr, with intensive management of exotic tree plantations during the last ~ 45 yr. At the same...

Study region: The natural river basins of Chile. Study focus: Drought effects on terrestrial ecosystems produce hydroclimatic stress with variable extensions. Particularly, hydrological drought duration can provide a better understanding of recovery together with catchment characteristics and climatology. This study focuses on the impacts of the mu...

Dryland forests are the areas most threatened by climate change, urbanization and land-use change simultaneously. Ecosystem services provided by Mediterranean dryland forests are have been in steep decline, and are extensively studied in the Mediterranean basin, however considerably less in other areas with Mediterranean climates. Knowledge of thes...

The Coastal Range in the Mediterranean segment of the Chilean active margin is a soil mantled landscape able to store fresh water and potentially support a biodiverse native forest. In this landscape, human intervention has been increasing soil erosion for ~200 yr, with the last ~45 yr experiencing intensive management of exotic tree plantations. A...

Valdés-Pineda et al. (Sustainability 14:413, 2022) present data for changes in climate, socio-economic, and land use and land cover (LULC) from diverse sources, concluding that the main causes for the desiccation of the Aculeo Lake were the river deviations and aquifer pumping, along with the impact of reduced precipitation. Based on that, they inf...

This paper reviews the current knowledge of hydrological processes in Chilean temperate forests which extend along western South America from latitude 29° S to 56° S. This geographic region includes a diverse range of natural and planted forests and a broad sweep of vegetation, edaphic, topographic, geologic, and climatic settings which create a un...

This paper reviews the current knowledge of hydrological processes in Chilean temperate forests which extend along western South America from latitude 29° S to 56° S. This geographic region includes a diverse range of natural and planted forests and a broad sweep of vegetation, edaphic, topographic, geologic, and climatic settings which create a un...

Nothofagus alessandrii , categorized as Endangered on the IUCN Red List, is an endemic, deciduous tree species of the coastal range of central Chile. We assessed the effects of fire severity, invasion by the exotic fire-prone Pinus radiata , and land-cover composition and configuration of the landscape on the resilience of fragments of N. alessandr...

Achieving a local understanding of fire regimes requires high-resolution, systematic and dynamic databases. High-quality information can help to transform evidence into decision-making in the context of rapidly changing landscapes, particularly considering that geographical and temporal patterns of fire regimes and their trends vary locally over ti...

Irrigation scheduling based on soil water content (Ɵw) sensors requires that Ɵw be maintained within a range (management lines) that is optimal for plant growth. The lower limit or “breaking point” is determined following the soil water content dynamics on the transition of a rapid rate of depletion to a slower, under similar reference evapotranspi...

Table grape production requires large amount of water, which can be problematic in semi-arid Mediterranean regions, where climate change projections anticipated reductions in water availability associated to decreases in precipitation and increases in temperature. In this context, this study aims to evaluate the effect of contrasting irrigation str...

Achieving a local understanding of fire regimes requires high resolution, systematic and dynamic databases. Highquality information can help to transform the evidence into decision-making in the context of rapidly changing landscapes, particularly considering that geographical and temporal patterns of fire regimes and their trends vary locally over...

Anthropogenic-based disturbances may alter peatland soil-plant causal associations and their ability to sequester carbon. Likewise, it is unclear how the vegetation attributes are linked with different soil C decomposition-based pools (i.e., live moss, debris, and poorly-to highly-decomposed peat) under grassing and harvesting conditions. Therefore...

Recent increase in the frequency and spatial extent of wildfires motivates the quick recognition of the affected soil properties over large areas. Digital Soil Mapping is a valuable approach to map soil attributes based on remote sensing and field observations. We predicted the spatial distribution of post-fire litter composition in a 40,600 ha bas...

The effect of different forest conservation policies on water provision has been poorly investigated due to a lack of an integrative methodological framework that enables its quantification. We developed a method for assessing the effects of forest conservation policies on water provision for rural inhabitants, based on a land-use model coupled wit...

The water crisis is a concern for Chilean agriculture. Testing new methods based on computer simulations is urgent to optimize irrigation. This study aimed to assess the model efficiency of HYDRUS 2D/3D simulations of volumetric water content (θ) and pore electrical conductivity (ECp) in an olive tree variety Kalamata under desert conditions. The m...

El Informe a las Naciones «Gobernanza Climática de los Elementos» que propone un nuevo modelo de gobernanza socioambiental orientado a responder a los desafíos que nos depara el cambio climático, ofreciendo un diagnóstico de la gobernanza actualmente existente en el país en relación con los cuatros elementos (agua, aire, fuego, tierra) y lineamient...

Many remote sensing-based evapotranspiration (RSBET) algorithms have been proposed in the past decades and evaluated using flux tower data, mainly over North America and Europe. Model evaluation across South America has been done locally or using only a single algorithm at a time. Here, we provide the first evaluation of multiple RSBET models, at a...

Sustained human pressures on the environment have significantly increased the frequency, extent, and severity of wildfires, globally. This is particularly the case in Mediterranean regions, in which human-caused wildfires represent up to 90% of all recorded wildfires ignitions. In Chile, it has been estimated that nearly 90% of wildfires are relate...

Propuesta científica desarrollada para la Comisión del Futuro de los Ecosistemas. Comisión del Futuro. Senado de Chile

1 Vegetation attributes derived from species and plant functional types (PFTs) directly or indirectly drive the carbon (C) cycle in peatlands. However, anthropogenic-based disturbances may alter petland soil-plant interactions and their ability to sequester carbon. Likewise, it is unclear how the soil-plant linkages among different soil C decomposi...

Informe con propuestas para el desarrollo forestal Sustentable de Chile, desde la Academia de Jóvenes por el Futuro con apoyo de Académicas/os, para la comisión de desafíos del futuro del Senado de la República de Chile.

En un contexto de cambio climático con menor disponibilidad de agua, resulta relevante incorporar tecnologías de riego que facilitan el uso eficiente y sustentable del agua en la agricultura familiar campesina (AFC). Por ello, se aplicó una metodología de estimación del tiempo y frecuencia de riego, utilizando tecnologías para el seguimiento del es...

The Aculeo Lake is an important natural reservoir of Central Chile, which provides valuable ecosystem services. This lake has suffered a rapid shrinkage of the water levels from year 2010 to 2018, and since October 2018, it is completely dry. This natural disaster is concurrent with a number of severe and uninterrupted drought years, along with sus...

Urban forests affect land surface temperature (LST) within a city due to the cooling effect of transpiration. The latter depends on tree health, but it can also be affected by the structure and composition of forest, as a mono-species environment may potentially worsen the health of urban forest. The following hypotheses are therefore proposed: a)...

Vegetation biomass is a globally important climate-relevant terrestrial carbon pool and also drives local hydrological systems via evapotranspiration. Vegetation biomass of individual vegetation types has been successfully estimated from active and passive remote sensing data. However, for many tasks, landscape-level biomass maps across several veg...

Climate change (CC) along with Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) have a strong influence in water availability in already fragile Mediterranean ecosystems. In this work the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was implemented for the 2006-2018 period in a rainfed catchment of central Chile (36°) to test the hypothesis that that adaptive plant...

En este libro, que integra la Serie Ciencias Agronómicas N°34, se describen, en 8 capítulos, diversas investigaciones que tributan a la adaptación frente a la escasez hídrica, representando una contribución para garantizar el desarrollo presente y futuro del país. Su contenido tiene el propósito de clarificar conceptos y entregar las bases para opt...

Soil physical properties influence vineyard behavior, therefore the knowledge of their spatial variability is essential for making vineyard management decisions. This study aimed to model and map selected soil properties by means of knowledge-based digital soil mapping approach. We used a Random Forest (RF) algorithm to link environmental covariate...

A critical aspect of predicting soil organic carbon (SOC) concentrations is the lack of available soil information; where information on soil characteristics is available, it is usually focused on regions of high agricultural interest. To date, in Chile, a large proportion of the SOC data have been collected in areas of intensive agricultural or fo...

Los resultados presentados en este informe son parte del trabajo interdisciplinario que realiza el Centro de Ciencia del Clima y la Resiliencia (CR)2. El (CR)2 es un centro de excelencia financiado por el programa FONDAP de CONICYT (Proyecto 15110009) en el cual participan cerca de 60 científicos asociados a la Universidad de Chile, la Universidad...

A critical aspect of predicting soil organic carbon (SOC) concentrations is the lack of available soil information; where information on soil characteristics is available, it is usually focused on regions of high agricultural interest. To date, in Chile, a large proportion of the SOC data have been collected in areas of intensive agricultural or fo...

La submesa Cambio de Uso del Suelo (CUS) tuvo como objetivo compilar y presentar en un informe la evidencia científica disponible sobre los cambios de uso del suelo y sus impactos en relación con las opciones de mitigación del cambio climático. Esta submesa contó con la participación de más de 30 científicos de diversas áreas de las ciencias ambien...

The changing role of fire in forest landscapes shows that strategic forest management is necessary to safeguard urban water supplies.

One of the critical aspects in modelling soil organic carbon (SOC) predictions is the lack of access to soil information which is usually concentrated in regions of high agricultural interest. In Chile, most soil and SOC data to date is highly concentrated in 25 % of the territory that has intensive agricultural or forestry use. Vast areas beyond t...

Threats to ecosystems are closely linked to human development, whereas lack, insufficiency, and inefficiency of public policies are important drivers of environmental decline. Previous studies have discussed the contribution of IUCN's Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) in conservation issues; however, its applications in different policy fields and instr...

Peatlands are key reservoirs of belowground carbon (C) and their monitoring is important to assess the rapid changes in the C cycle caused by climate change and direct anthropogenic impacts. Frequently, information of peatland area and vegetation type estimated by remote sensing has been used along with soil measurements and allometric functions to...

Over the past 40 years, south-central Chile has experienced important land-use-induced land cover changes, with massive conversion from native forests (NF) to Pinus radiata D.Don and Eucalyptus spp. exotic forest plantations (FP). Several case studies have related this conversion to a reduction in water supply within small catchments (<100 ha). In...

Chile is one of the first documented nations to undergo a forest transition dominated by tree farm expansion. Scenario modelling can inform the possible outcomes of forest conservation policies, especially when the scenarios are rooted in the political dynamics that shaped the current legislation. In Chile, tree farms of non-native Radiata Pine and...

Hydrological responses to landcover changes

Land use and land cover changes (LULCC) within a highly anthropized Mediterranean landscape dominated by industrial tree plantation leads to degradation of soil physical properties. This process has been more intense in the coastal range of south-central Chile due to its soils, which are highly susceptible to erosion, combined with a long history o...

The "blooming desert", or the explosive development and flowering of ephemeral herbaceous and some woody desert species during years with abnormally high accumulated rainfall, is a spectacular biological phenomenon of the hyper-arid Atacama Desert (northern Chile) attracting botanists, ecologists, geo-scientists, and the general public from all ove...

Introduction Peatlands are key reservoirs of belowground carbon (C) stock and their monitoring is important to assess the rapid changes in the C cycle caused by climate change and anthropogenic impacts. We assessed the use of aboveground vegetation traits as proxies to predict peatland belowground C stock. First, the ecological relations between re...

Threats to natural ecosystems are closely linked to human development, and the lack, insufficiency or inefficiency of public policies are some of the most important drivers of negative effects on the environment. The contribution of the IUCN’s Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) to conservation topics has been discussed in previous studies; however, to da...

We introduce the first catchment dataset for large sample studies in Chile. This dataset includes 516 catchments; it covers particularly wide latitude (17.8 to 55.0∘ S) and elevation (0 to 6993 m a.s.l.) ranges, and it relies on multiple data sources (including ground data, remote-sensed products and reanalyses) to characterise the hydroclimatic co...

Worldwide, urbanization constitutes a major and growing driver of global change and a distinctive feature of the Anthropocene. Thus, urban development paths present opportunities for technological and societal transformations towards energy efficiency and decarbonization, with benefits for both greenhouse gas (GHG) and air pollution mitigation. Thi...

The efforts and actions of conservation have been focused mainly in species or population levels. However, the UICN has recently developed an analogous methodology to the Red List of Threatened species to assess the risk of ecosystems following similar criteria, creating the Red List of Ecosystems (RLE). Among the most important challenges to the a...

We introduce the first catchment data set for large sample studies in Chile (South America). The data set includes 516 catchments and provides catchment boundaries, daily streamflow records and basin-averaged time series of the following hydrometeorological variables: 1) daily precipitation retrieved from four gridded sources; 2) daily maximum, min...

Since 2010 an uninterrupted sequence of dry years, with annual rainfall deficits ranging from 25 to 45 %, has prevailed in central Chile (western South America, 30–38∘ S). Although intense 1- or 2-year droughts are recurrent in this Mediterranean-like region, the ongoing event stands out because of its longevity and large extent. The extraordinary...

Peatlands are ecosystems of great relevance, because they have an important number of ecological functions that provide many services to mankind. However, studies focusing on plant diversity, addressed from the remote sensing perspective, are still scarce in these environments. In the present study, predictions of vascular plant richness and divers...

Since 2010 an uninterrupted sequence of dry years, with annual rainfall deficits ranging from 25 to 45 %, has prevailed in Central Chile (western South America, 30–38° S). Although intense 1- or 2-year droughts are recurrent in this Mediterranean-like region, the ongoing event stands out because of its longevity and large spatial extent. The extrao...

Making accurate estimations of daily and annual Rs fluxes is key for understanding the carbon cycle process and projecting effects of climate change. In this study we used high-frequency sampling (24-measurements per day) of Rs in a temperate rainforest during one year, with the objective of answering the questions of when and how often measurement...

Making accurate estimations of daily and annual Rs fluxes is key for understanding the carbon cycle process and projecting effects of climate change. In this study we used high-frequency sampling (24 measurements per day) of Rs in a temperate rainforest during 1 year, with the objective of answering the questions of when and how often measure- ment...

Modalidad: Comunicación libre Línea temática: El Sistema Nacional de Áreas Protegidas del Estado y su contribución a la conservación del patrimonio natural y cultural del país. Resumen Los ecosistemas a nivel mundial han sido sometidos a los embates de las actividades del ser humano, causando un fuerte impacto sobre la función, composición y estruc...

We generated 8 land cover maps for the 2000-2014 period in Cauquenes and Purapel catchments, located in Maule region’s inner dryland, Central Chile, to test for relations between landscape structural and configurational changes and runoff coefficients at annual and seasonal scale at subcatchment level. Overall accuracies ranged from 85% to 100%. A...

During the last decade, the IUCN has developed criteria analogous to the Red List of Threatened Species to per- form similar risk assessment on ecosystems, creating the Red List of Ecosystems methodology. One of the most significant challenges for the construction of these lists is the gathering and availability of the information needed to apply t...

Erosion results from the interaction of processes occurring at different rates, time scales and spatial extents, involving mass and energy transfer between systems such as the biosphere, atmosphere and lithosphere. In a increasingly complex landscape subject to recurrent intense intervention, the antropic effect on sediment generation and erotion i...

A method to predict vascular plant richness using spectral and textural variables in a heterogeneous wetland is presented. Plant richness was measured at 44 sampling plots in a 16-ha anthropogenic peatland. Several spectral indices, first-order statistics (median and standard deviation), and second-order statistics [metrics of a gray-level co-occur...

Stretching over 4300 km north to south, Chile is a special country with complicated landscapes and rich biodiversity. Accurate and timely updated land cover map of Chile in detailed classification categories is highly demanded for many applications. A conclusive land cover map integrated from multi-seasonal mapping results and a seasonal dynamic ma...

Peatlands are a type of wetland characterized by the accumulation of organic matter, called peat, and are important carbon reservoirs. In areas with poor drainage, human-induced forest fires and logging can produce flooded conditions and organic matter accumulation, which generates an ecosystem called anthropogenic peatland. Productive management a...